ICA | Choreographic Devices 4

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Live

Edgar Schmitz, 'film still 5 (corniche)', 2023, detail, courtesy the artist

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Choreographic Devices is an annual event series that activates the choreographic as a methodology for trans-disciplinary forms of inquiry and rehearsal. Bringing together protagonists from across an expanded ecology of practices, this multi-format forum speculates on and with choreographic arrangements and their complex modes of co-production. Choreographic Devices tests how material assemblages, organisational forms, and modes of being alongside each other, might be choreographed otherwise. Contributors to the fourth iteration include Murat Adash, Anjana Bala, jee chan, Ofri Cnaani, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Ella Finer, keyon gaskin, Jelena Golubović, Martin Hargreaves, Raimundas Malasauskas, Arjuna Neuman, Nissa Nishikawa, Bilawa Ade Respati, Heidi Rustgaard, Sara Sassanelli, Edgar Schmitz, SERAFINE1369, Esther Siddiquie, Vaida Stepanovaité and Bartosz Zurowski.

Choreographic Devices is supported by CHASE, Goldsmiths and Rose Choreographic School.

Please note that Choreographic Devices' cinema screening on 17 Jan, Ancestral Clouds Ancestral Claims, is ticketed separately, and can be purchased here.

Artist Bios

Murat Adash is a German-Turkish artist and researcher whose practice is preoccupied with notions of thresholds: focusing on the dynamic edges where things begin or end, where they cross over—between bodies and spaces, inter-subjectivities, (in)visibilities, (dis)appearances and across media-specific boundaries. Through an expanded choreographic practice across a range of media (performance, moving image, installation), Murat continues to explore the phenomenon of camouflage as a spatio-temporal act—a process through which the self is negotiated in and through space, processes that are intrinsic to choreography as well.

Anjana Bala is a dance artist and anthropologist. She is mostly curious about how people live and how they might live well. She is part of the Rose Choreographic School at Sadler’s Wells and teaches at the London School of Economics.

jee chan is an artist and choreographer whose practice often examines the potential of the displaced body, driven by their research concerning ancestral epistemologies and oral histories. As a leitmotif in their work, the sea has evoked themes of migration, memory, grief and transformation to address deep historical violence, particularly through the lens of island Southeast Asia. zuntukyun.com

OFRI CNAANI is an artist and researcher who works across performance and media. Her work has been shown at Tate Britain, London; Venice Architecture Biennale; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Inhotim Institute, Brazil; PS1/MoMA, New York; BMW Guggenheim Lab, New York; and Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna. Cnaani is a guest professor at TU Wien and a research fellow at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA) at the University of Amsterdam. She recently completed a project at the International Space Station.

Denise Ferreira da Silva is an artist and philosopher. She currently is the Samuel Rudin Professor in the Humanities at the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Literatures, at NYU. Her  artistic and academic work reflect and speculate on questions crucial to contemporary philosophy, political theory, black thought, feminist thought, and historical materialism. She is the author of Toward a Global Idea of Race (2007), Unpayable Debt (2022) amongst many other titles.

Ella Finer’s work in sound and performance spans writing, composing, and curating with a particular interest in how bodies acoustically disrupt, challenge, or change occupations of space. Her research continuously queries the ownership of cultural expression through sound; often through collaborative projects centring listening as a practice of deep attention, affiliation and reciprocity. She is working on a book of essays: Acoustic Commons and the Wild Life of Sound, while Silent Whale Letters, a correspondence project with Vibeke Mascini and edited by Kate Briggs, was published by Sternberg Press in 2023.

keyon gaskin prefers not to contextualize with their credentials.

Jelena Golubović’s interests, creative pursuits and scholarly endeavours stretch over music, the visual arts and conceptual art: interplays between language, societies, and visual thinking—communication of the unspeakable through the absence of verbal expression—transregional and border thinking.

Martin Hargreaves works with/in dramaturgical vacillations and pedagogic chancing, instigating and/or inhabiting various collaborative constellations to temporarily manifest choreographic possibilities. He is Head of the Rose Choreographic School, an experimental research project within Sadler’s Wells, and is a visiting lecturer at S

Raimundas Malašauskas has co-written an opera libretto, co-produced a television show, served as an agent for dOCUMENTA (13), curated oO, the Lithuanian and Cyprus pavilions at the 55th Venice Biennale, and kept occurring under hypnosis.

Fernanda Muñoz-Newsome is a London based artist, choreographer and dancer creating immersive performance and workshops. Through dance, voice and somatic practice she explores diverse experiences of collective and embodied power. Collaboration is key within process and performance works crafting ecologies of liveness, risk, care and access. Fernanda creates performance that shifts perspectives, rippling between internal and external human, and more than human space-time. Her work through collective ritual and divinatory practice orientated through innate gut, intuitive and imaginative potential.

Arjuna Neuman is an artist, filmmaker, and writer and he is the co-founder of www.archiveofbelonging.org – a resource database for migrants and refugees. Neuman works with the essay as a guiding, multi-perspectival and inherently future-oriented form that underpins his experimental research and creative approach. As a writer he has published essays in Relief Press, The Journal for New Writing, VIA Magazine, Concord, Art Voices, Flaunt, LEAP, Hearings Journal, and e- flux. He studied at California Institute of the Arts.

Nissa Nishikawa’s multidisciplinary practice, comprising of performance, poetry, painting, sculpture and film, researches and interprets traditional forms of dance, ritual and craft. Nishikawa illuminates animistic and alchemical philosophies with an embodied and structural approach, often working in the open-air and studios equipped to house fire; interconnecting the layers of the arcane with the supra-sensual, the living earth and various conscious inhabitants.

Bilawa Ade Respati is a musician based in Berlin, performing on and writing for the Javanese Gamelan and the guitar. His current artistic interest is in the dialectic between tradition and innovation, where he experiments with the amalgam of algorithmic music composition and the idiom of gamelan music. sastraswara.site/

Heidi Rustgaard, choreographer, dancer, curator, and lecturer, has collaborated with Hanna Gillgren as H2DANCE since 2000. As an artist cohort of Rose Choreographic School, she develops sonic choreographic scores exploring her one-note concept, using singular elements—one note and one movement to queer and de-habituate forms. She co-founded and curate Fest en Fest, a festival of expanded choreography.

Edgar Schmitz’ architectures, films and soundtracks  are concerned with developing modes of withdrawal. His work has been the subject of solo presentations at Netwerk Aalst, Himalayas Museum Shanghai, Cooper Gallery Dundee, FormContent London, the ICA, and has featured in A.C.A.D.E.M.Y at Vanabbemuseum, No Soul for Sale at Tate Modern, and British Art Show 7 among others. He founded the CHOREOGRAPHIC and ANIMATE ASSEMBLY research clusters at Goldsmiths and is Director of the Art Research MPhil/ PhD Programme there.

SERAFINE1369 is an artist, dancer and body-focused researcher working with dancing as a philosophical undertaking, a political project with ethical psycho-spiritual ramifications for being-in-the-world; dancing as intimate technology. They work with/in the context of the hostile architectures of the metropolis towards moments and states of transcendence.

Esther Siddiquie is a Bochum-based artist whose practice involves performative stagings of sensory encounters with archival objects. She explores the notion of ghostly matter in the entanglements between human and more-than-human realms. Her research critically examines a film archive of UNESCO World Cultural Heritage Sites created by her late father, Shabbir Siddiquie. She is a PhD candidate in Advanced Practices at Goldsmiths, University of London.

VAIDA STEPANOVAITĖ organises, researches, curates, and writes in arts and academia and beyond. She is interested in the desire to collectivise otherwise under inhospitable conditions and to negotiate mutable forms of togetherness. She is conducting practice-based doctoral research and teaches at the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London.

Bartosz Żurowski is a drama director, filmmaker, and writer. He is a Ph.D. candidate in Philosophy and Critical Thought at the European Graduate School. His interests include ritual, community, masculinity, and playfulness. He strongly believes in play and wit as indispensable elements for self-development and group processes. Since 2009, he has worked with various spiritual leaders and teachers from Asia and South America, immersing himself in their music and traditions.

Schedule

SUN 19/1, 12:30 - 22:00, ICA THEATRE:

12:30

Sara Sassanelli and Fernanda Muñoz-Newsome

A movement session led by artist and choreographer Fernanda Muñoz-Newsome. Please note that you will be invited to move in this session.

13:30 break [10 mins]

13:40

Murat Adash et al: “Darkness, Darkness”

This session features live contributions by Murat Adash, Nissa Nishikawa, and Bartosz Zurowski, each of whom engages with the shape-shifting elements of movement, language, sound, and storytelling as vehicles for traversing altered states of corpo-realities. Distinct acts of moving, speaking, singing, and narrating intertwine and juxtapose one another, collectively drawing on bodily and sonic practices to rehearse new ways of seeing and listening. These practices open pathways to a multiplicity of emergent and constructed relationalities, intimacies, futurities, and cosmologies.

Loosely framed by the concept of darkness, each contribution uniquely addresses a range of interconnected themes, including indigenous knowledge systems, ceremony, alterity, and permeability. Together, these elements weave a sensory-rich tapestry that navigates the provisional nature of identities, realities, and subjectivities. By embracing this fluidity, the session invites reflection on altered forms of knowing, sensing, feeling, and thinking, offering participants an embodied encounter with the possibilities of transformation and collective reimagining.

14:55 break [10 mins]

15:05

jee chan et al: “laut jerebu (the sea where land is out of sight)”

This sharing takes the shape of a conversation between jee chan, Jelena Golubović and Bilawa Ade Respati. Drawing upon our respective lived experiences across Southeast Asia and Southeast Europe, we discuss issues surrounding the choreographies of language, mapping, nationhood and diaspora in relation to the construction of identity. The conversation will be interspersed with moments of song from the Central Javanese gamelan tradition—the context in which the three of us met, as well as a point of reference.

16:05 BREAK [45 mins]

16:50

Ofri Cnaani: “A habit is a form. A thought is a form. A friendship is a form”

Ofri Cnaani and Vaida Stepanovaitė with Anjana Bala, Martin Hargreaves, Heidi Rustgaard, and Esther Siddiquie

18:05 break [15 mins for setting up]

18:20

Serafine1369

19:20

Raimundas Malasauskas

19:50

keyon gaskin: “an explo(it/r)ation of keyon gaskin”

bEinGS BuiLdinG buILdiNgs buiLdInG BeiNGs; a solo

20:20 onwards: open plenary/ post-show drinks in bar area

Book tickets

12:30 pm

Sun, 19 Jan 2025

Stage

£15 (+ booking fee)
Concessions available

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